mysynthfetish
MySynthFetish
Unholy Passion For Machines
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Rattle rattle
I bought a mixer off Mercari a few weeks back, finally got around to cleaning up the former Lair of Nefarious Machinery enough to the point where I can start putting things together again. I went to put the mixer on the rack and noticed a rather loud rattling sound coming from inside when I tilted it 90º to either side. What is this? Loose screw? Hmmmm. Let the surgery begin.
I removed the plastic side panels just to slim the thing down. Once I had the bottom panel off, I shook it again and this fell out.
Say what? A shell from an electrolytic capacitor? Whaaaaaat? Never seen that before! So, did the cap shit itself, or did the shell just fall off, seeing as it looks like an el-cheapo Chinese part. LH Nova? What the fuck company is that? Goddammit. So I ordered a replacement online. Taking the mixer apart fully was a real task, as Mackies are built like tanks even now.
There are about 100 electrolytic caps on the PCBs. It took a minute to find the one that blew its top. But here it is in all its blown up glory. Doesn't look like a catastrophic fire and smoke involved failure though. Hmmmm.
Here's the whole thing before I removed the blown cap. OK maybe 100 was an exaggeration. Still.. Shitloads.
Here's the replacement one, next to a paired cap of equal value. I replaced it with a Nichicon FG series cap, which is audio grade, if that actually means anything at all. It's a tad larger than the factory ones. Anyway, it's all done and back together now. Easy enough.
Get a load of this guy. I was gonna carefully unroll it just to see what I could see but decided against it in the end. Bog knows what the hell is lurking inside that mess. Yecccch. It's crazy to think that I am able to do this kind of 'repair' though. I didn't know feck all about this kind of thing even though my old man was an electronics engineer who worked for Honeywell on space shuttle and missile guidance components in the early 70s until they laid off half the workforce right after the oil shock. I learned everything from YouTube videos and reading online resources. The internet can be a blackhole vortex of shitfuckery, no doubt, but here and there you can find valuable resources that even 15, 20 years ago were just simply out of reach. Freaks me out sometimes thinking about the gap between these two extremes. Anyway, that's all for now folks. Hope your part of the rock is doing ok.
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Failure... Success...
After I got the DR-220E, I saw this DR-220A on the auction for ¥2,000 being sold as 'junk' and thought what the hell, why not? I cleaned the leaked battery juice off the E, probably just another case of the same but more of it. Boy was I wrong...
I immediately knew I was in for a bad trip when I opened the battery compartment and was met with that. I plugged in a wall wart and turned it on but no luck, it was dead as fuck. So I opened it up to see how far the corrosion had gone.
There's the reverse side of the battery terminals in the second picture. If you look at the resistors on the left side, you can see corrosion. How far HAD the corrosion crept?
All the way through the traces on the PCB to the main IC. And see those down arrows? The corrosion had all but eaten the screws that used to be there. Holy fuck! It was the worst case of battery corrosion gone buck wild that I have ever seen. And the smell? Oof. I still haven't thrown it in the trash. Some silly part of me is like but but but maybe something can be salvaged? NOPE. The freakin traces on the PCB were BLACK. The corrosion had grown up out of the solder spots like a fungus or slime mold. Gnarly shit man!
I dunno if I posted this previously. I wanted one of these for ages. Saw one on Mercari (flea market app) for a reasonable price so I bought it. Fun synth. I saw someone on schmootube referred to it as the iSynth. Heh. Not quite up to the Apple design aesthetic methinks.
Got a few Aira Compact machines, a pair of S-1s and a T-8. Stuck knob caps from Thonk on 'em and they look and feel nicer now. S-1 is basically a 2020's MC-202 on steroids. T-8 is fun for what it is. The size and fun factor are big scorers here. They sound great as well.
Picked this up off the auction just to play some short C-64 voice synthesizer samples live in a gig I got coming up. Not sure how I feel about this thing. It'll do what I need it to so that's all I can ask I guess.
The Drum Mint!!! What a wee weirdo! Fun little shit. I can't believe people are baking shit like this up in their free time. Maniacs! Sounds ghetto as hell. Right up my alley.
Last but not least, the Elmyra 2. Bought the DIY kit off Thonk. Took about two and a half hours to solder together. Endless jacks and pots. Mind-numbing. Did it at work, since the school year is over and I have no more paid time off and there's feck all to do anyway. Very interesting machine. Definitely from some dark corner of outer space. Fun stuff.
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Is there a doctor in the haus?
I’ve wanted one of these for a while, just because they’re kooky and a bit rare. They don’t show up on the auction here that often anymore, but when they do they’re usually around ¥10,000 ($100 to me). This one was listed as ‘junk’ and didn’t come with the special carrying case or anything, and as you’ll see in the next photo had a big battery leak corrosion problem so it was ¥5,000 including shipping. Yay!
Yeah so the right side there at the top was nasty. It ran off a wall wart but no go with batteries, and these use the batteries for memory retention so that right there was a problem. As this wasn’t a terminal soldered to the PCB I yanked it out and soaked it in vinegar for an hour.
Pretty grody. Yuck.
This is after a hour’s soak. I took it out then Q-tipped it. The reverse side was pretty nasty too, so I soaked it some more then took it out and swabbed the backside down, then headed to the superintendent’s room (I did this at work), borrowed a fine file and a wire brush and went at it. Here’s the result.
Not the best angle for a photo but it’s miles better than it was before. Put it all back together, plopped some batteries in and fired it up.
It’s alive! Battery corrosion is an easy thing to take care of, even if it means in extreme cases fabricating new metal terminals yourself. Luckily this time vinegar and elbow grease did the trick. Now it’s off to make some dirty 80’s Simmons wanna-be electronic funk.
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Ups & Downs, Mostly Downs.
I sold it all. At some point way back around late April, I just felt like I never wanted to set eyes on a piece of gear again and I sold just about everything I owned. There's an empty A-frame keyboard stand, an empty Apex 3-tier keyboard stand, a mostly vacant 7U rack with a Roland 1U line mixer in it that the aux doesn't work. A KPR-77 and a DDD-5 hiding under a pile of stuff in the corner. And the HS-80 I chop shopped. Everything else, gone. I dunno what did it. Depression. Lack of motivation. Changing mindset. Laziness. Honestly, I hadn't touched anything really, at least seriously, in an "I'mma produce something" kind of way for well over a year. Just half-heartedly poked at stuff then turned it off after letting out a great big sigh. So it went.
Eight months later, after the death of my father, and a lot more heavy mental baggage type stuff, I found myself itching to make music again. The iPad an KORG Gadget wasn't cutting it. Don't get me wrong, I played a live set in Osaka two years ago using just that and it went off. I wanted something a bit more, I dunno, substantial? And with more synthesis power? So I bought an MC-707. Haven't really done much but scratch the surface and noodle around but I'm impressed with the Zen-core or whatever they're calling it. Glad to see the D-50 DNA is still there (four partial synthesis engine) and the Zenology plugin editor makes sound design a shit ton easier. So we'll see where that goes. I also had the itch for a vocoder, so....
Couldn't leave well enough alone, had to change out the LEDs before I even tried it out to see if it worked or not. That green theme Roland is going with gags me... Looks better in red. If I have half a mind I may attack the MC-707 but I dunno. The LEDs were the super tiny ones, 0603 size if I remember right. SMALL AS FUCK!
Had to use 303 eh? Heh. That's the one under the Robot pad. Literally smaller than the graphite tip on a pencil by half. DO NOT SNEEZE. But I have a tool which I may have talked about that made removing these a helluva lot easier, el-cheapo made in china hot tweezers!
Got these for around $50 or something off AliExpress, I think. Sometimes the ends don't meet up, so you have to open and close them again. Definitely not made in Japan quality, but nowhere near the price either. Ah well. Today I meant to bring liquid solder in a syringe, which makes soldering the LEDs on super easy but noooo like a dumbass I forgot, so it was back to the old slow way... put solder on the pads, tin the LEDs (NOT EASY!), heat one pad, slide the LED on (using tweezers), then hit the other side. Time consuming but it worked. Hmph.
Anyway. It hasn't been an easy year at all. I've seen better times. I've had better years. Trying to bring 2023 to an end on a brighter note. Hope you guys out there are doing well.
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The TRON JD-Xi...
So I felt like I wanted a vocoder again, and after all the ones I've used and didn't feel like revisiting, I thought I'd like to try something new, so I ended up with the JD=Xi. I found a limited edition white model at Implant4, and bought it. Right from the start, I was put off by the red LEDs. What the hell was Roland thinking? Totally ugly. Ewww. Fuck. So I opened it up and of course the majority are surface mount LEDs, but the ones around the knobs were through-hole LEDs. OK. I Replaced the analog synth section LEDs with blue, as it matches the test color on the panel, and all else with white because, well, the fucker is white innit? SMD LEDs. Fuck. I did NOT wanna deal with these with a normal soldering iron and desoldering braid etc etc, so I looked around and found that someone devised these things called hot tweezers, which are basically two soldering iron arms that curve together in a squeezable grip, with a variable temperature control, so you can grab an SMD component and easily pull it off within a second or two. The only problem was the reputable Japanese manufacturers MSRP of hot tweezers run about $400. I saw an el-cheapo version on AliExpress for about $50, and thought well, made in chinkland but what the hell. I generally dislike stuff made in "the mainland" as they call it here. Slave labor with near zero work ethic, well, it just isn't a good combo for reliable products. Behringer I'm looking at you here, when is my Pro-1 gonna blow up? Anyway... The things were sketchy, didn't meet at the tip when squeezed, parts came loose in the box, having fallen out of the wee ziplock baggie they were supposed to be in... not a good first impression but the thing worked for what I needed it for, so I'm cool with it. Saved SO much time. I also took a different approach to soldering the fucking microscopic SMD LEDs. I bought soldering paste that comes in a hypodermic needle looking thing. A wee shot of solder paste on the solder pads, slap the LED down and the paste works like glue to hold the part down, then hit the left and right sides with a normal fine-tipped soldering iron. Bam! Worked like a charm and took hardly any time at all. Thing looks straight outta Tron now. Very cool. Now it's time to fool around programming vocoder patches.
Um, a word about the JD-Xi... It's like a groovebox with keys. Two digital synths in the JD DNA line, plus a gimmicky analog synth part and a drum part. Pretty fun. Weird. Roland engineers musta been drunk/high when they came up with this thing. I'm having fun with it. Weirdo synth though, that's for sure.
Hope you guys are doing well. I caught Omicron on Xmas day. Jeeeeeeez-o-wiz. Fucked me up real good. I'm only now fully back to normal. Not fun. See ya next time.
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Omicron and on and on and on and on
What was that 90s song, "Onward ever ever on, destination Eschaton," Shamen or something? Weird how I recall random shit like that but ask me what I had for dinner yesterday and I'm like duhhrrrr... but anyway so yeah Omicron got me.
So that was fucking loads of fun. I've had three vaccinations so far. Time came for the 4th and I was like nah. So would I have caught this if I'd went and had that vaccination? Who knows. Anyway, I felt kinda funky Friday, then Friday night around 2am the fever hit and hit hard. Chills and cold sweat while simultaneously burning up with fever, and my knees and lower back were screaming, what the hell? Took some Target brand Advil, one of the staple take-back-to-japan things I buy when in the US, fever went down. Went to the local PCR test center, result was negative. Hmmm? But then Sunday it was roller coaster fun between normalcy and feverishness, headache, and then the sore throat from hell started. Seriously the worst sore throat I've ever had. So I went to the local outpatient clinic and did the double whammy flu/covid two-for-the-price-of-one test and welliwelliwell, positive. Doc said I probably did the first test too early or the reliability of the test I took was questionable. I don't care which. Told the doc about the sore throat and he was like "ah, omicron!" So he gave me these drops you flip in a glass and then dilute with water and gargle with, check the color of this shit out:
Funky! If I wasn't half out my head at the time I woulda busted out the UV LED flashlight I have and seen if it glowed. Shit worked wonders though. Wife went on full panic mode. Basically sequestered me off in the gear room and forbid me to come out except to use the loo, after which I have to wipe down everything with disinfectant flushable wipes, or to use the shower after everyone else has gone, then she goes in with a spray bottle of bleach and douses the entire bath/shower unit. Gotta wear a mask and plastic gloves when I leave the room. Madness. All this and my older daughter still caught it. Unavoidable really. And I offered to fuck off to a business hotel for the duration but no that costs money. Hmph. Anyway... Hell of a way to end the year.
Yay officer K's spinner from Bladerunner 2049. I've been watching that movie on repeat for the past three weeks now. And the original, both theatrical release and final cut versions, of course. I'm very intrigued by the sound design and soundtrack. They had some serious shoes to fill following Vangelis with the original, but I think they did damn good. I'd love to know what they used as far as synths/softsynths go, effects too. The piano at the start of the film sounds like it was run through an Eventide processor, the H9 and the H3000 I had way back when did stuff like that, reverb and reversed, pitched delays. Super neat but not cheap.
Well I hope you peeps out there had a better end of the year than we're having here right now. Who knows what madness awaits in 2023. More shenanigans for sure. Be well, and remember, слава україні, путін хуйло, йована русня!
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JP-8000 part deux for double trouble
No, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. Them there's two JP-8000s y'all. I saw another one on the auction this time, same deal, no sound, low battery, memory corrupt. So I paid about the same as the other one and sure enough, the same exact capacitor (C219) had shat itself, and fucking royally on this one. The PCB was a bit rough underneath that component, needed a lot of cleaning up. This time, I decided to replace that bad cap with a standard audio grade electrolytic capacitor instead of the pain-in-the-rectum surface mount microscopic fucking thing. The solder pads are large enough that you can finagle the legs on the capacitor and get it soldered down no problem, so that was the option I chose. Looks like this.
You can see it in the center, a bit off to the left, under the white connector there. A bit ghetto, but it brought the synth back to life. I used a 25-volt replacement, instead of the 16v factory value. While I was at it, just for the fuck of it, I recapped the power supply.
No need to bend over the bottom two caps this time as I went with a lower voltage rated part because I used a different supplier that had more options in stock. Everything fits and works fine. But like the dumbass I am I forgot to replace the battery before I closed everything back up again. Dumbassssss!!! Fuck. Oh well.
Just for your information, here are the values of the old caps versus the new ones. C219 was a whopping 57nF, shoulda been 22uF. The replacement was 22uF. Others: 10,000uF, old 9310, new 10,150. 470 uF, old 491 and 497 vs 467 twice. 47uF, old 47.1 and 47.3 vs 46 and 46.7. 100uF, old 110 vs 100. So the general trend here seems to be for the older caps to increase in capacitance, aside from the 10,000uF fucker. Even so, they're still all within the +/-10% variance so again, I wonder, is there a need to replace these? I guess the argument could be made that replacing them will add another 20 to 30 years of life to the synth before the new caps go kaput. Still.... I dunno. Now let's hope I can get a good return on my investment for this one.
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Capacitor Conundrum
Hullo again. As you may know, I generally make it a rule to replace the capacitors in the power supplies of 80s-90s synths and other gear I get my hands on. Things age, and components have life expectancies if you will. But I thought about it for a minute after the last two recap jobs. Was it really necessary? I didn't have a multimeter that could measure capacitance, so Jamazon to the rescue. I measured the values of the caps from the power supply of the JP-8000 I just did, as well as the three from the DW-6000 that I did a little while ago.
For the most part, the accepted variance with capacitors is +/- 10%. SO it was with that in mind that I measured the caps. The results are as follows. Caps from JP-8000, marked value, measured value. 100u, 103u. 47u x2, both 45u. 470u x2, one 447u, the other 470u. 10,000u, 9260u. Caps from DW-6000. 1000u, 1050u. 4700u, 4250u. 6800u, 6980u. Hmmmmm. All of them are within the +/- 10% range. So, given that the parts could still be considered as within tolerance does that mean replacing them was pointless? Good question. If I had found even one that was way out of spec, I'd feel differently. Is it worth doing anymore? Who knows.
Just for shits and giggles, I measured a handful of random value new caps I have in the parts bin. Here's what I found, same style as above. 2200u, 2130u. 3300u, 3150u. 220u, 207u. 100u, 92u. 22u, 22u. Hmmmmmmmmmm.... Kinda the same variance distribution as the old ones. If anything, all I can say is that with the old ones there were a few that measured higher capacitance than marked, whereas the new ones all measured lower than or at the marked value. I'm sure if my sample size was larger I'd get a better idea of things but who got time fo dat? In any case, this was an interesting and thought-provoking little adventure.
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JP-800000000000000000000
Haha not really, just the JP-8000.
I was surprised to see these things are going for over a grand now. Last time I checked they were half that or less. Why the jump in price? Hmmmm. Anyway this one came from Mercari. The seller described it as functioning but with no output, headphones ok, low battery memory corrupt! message on power up. A wee bit of google sleuthing and I found a fix, so I bought the synth and ordered parts. The low/zero output culprit is this guy.
Capacitor 219. A 16. 22uF SMD weeee little fucker. Screwdriver tip for size comparison. The component is 5mm wide. Here's the mainboard after I removed the bad one.
You can see two solder pads there above the white connector, just below the center of the photo. While desoldering the capacitor, the tell-tale stink of a bad cap wafted up and nearly gagged me. Yuck.
Different angle, with the new one in. I used a 22v 22uF part because I read that the circuit is running at 15v and that's close to tolerance for a 16v cap so there you go. Man was this a bitch to do, my goddam hands are shaky as fuck. While I was at it I thought I'd recap the power supply.
Had to do some creative component placing as I'd ordered 35v versions of everything so the parts were physically much larger than the factory stuff. I did find that the wee one on the right you see there, the 35v version was too fat and stout so it wouldn't fit in there with the two tilted over ones, but a search in the parts bin uncovered a 16v one so I went with that. Let me add that getting the power supply BOX out of the synth was a bit of a pain in the ass, as it is this huge metal high-sided tray kind of thing, and to get to the power supply board you have to remove everything that's above it, see here:
There's a PCB with the power switch and socket for the plug there, and another PCB with an IC that needs to be screwed to the chassis of the power box thing. Pain in the ass, but just takes time and attention to get done. In the end, the thing works fine now. I'll probably mess with it for a few months and then sell it, who knows.
Meanwhile, I've been playing a lot with the JD-08 and the JX-08, slapping them into the K-25m keyboard and doing sound design with the thing on my lap. I was really impressed with the JD, so much so that I've decided to sell the JD-800 I have. That thing is a tank. SOOOO big. But yeah Roland really nailed the JD-800 sound with the JD-08. And it's got lots of polyphony as well as a B memory bank, so it's like having a card with the JD-800. I wish the sliders were just a but bigger though. Fuck those things are tiny!
That's all for this time, my invisible pals out there in internet land.
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Another Old Friend, Again
I wanted to get a TG77 (again) for a while but any time I looked on the auction or digimart there were none listed, so some time ago I said whatever and bought an SY77 thinking "same thing" but I was wrong. The synth engine is the same but the preset sounds are different and there is one that I really really like on the TG that was not present on the SY (Aquavox or something like that). That was disappointing, but I had fun with the SY anyway for a bit, until I started to notice how much space it took up... so I thought I would just sell it and wait til I found a TG77 sometime in the future. At least a year has gone by since then if not more. Anyway I was killing time browsing the auction the other day and FINALLY saw a TG77 and thought yay! Nobody else bid, so I won. When it arrived, it was working but in obvious need of some repairs. The screen backlight was dead, a handful of buttons simply did not respond, others would respond half the time, while others were perfectly fine. Anyway I decided to replace the screen entirely and put an LED white on black one in. Part of that process involved replacing the tact switches for the Shift, F1-F8 and Exit buttons, as the new screen is a tad thicker than the stock one, so the height of the factory tact switch buttons is a fraction too low. The guy who sells the screens provided a set of tact switches with the screen, so that was nice. While I was at it, I decided just to say fuggit and replace the whole entire set of tact switches with the slightly taller version. Have a peek:
De-tact-switchified.
New ones done. Everything works perfectly now. And I think in my previous post I talked about the chorus on the DW-6000 making a noticeable but not really in your face bit of white noise at the top of the chorus LFO, so I removed the MN3209 BBD and MN3102 clock chips, put sockets in, and tried my luck with a set of replacement ICs. But, nothing changed. Hmmmmmm.
Maybe I'll hunt down the service notes and see if there's anything mentioned about a noisy chorus and if so how to fix or adjust it. There is a trimmer there, VR1, but without a schematic I sure as hell don't feel like reverse engineering the PCB to figure out what it does. It would be cool if it was there to adjust the chorus LFO speed but I think they didn't design the clock circuit like that. Hmmmmmm. Well that's all for now. Look out for number one, and don't step in number two.
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Revisiting another old pal
Wow, wonky crooked photo. Anyway. I bought a Modwave back in spring, and that thing sounds mad, very nice, easily into Microwave II XT territory and beyond thanks to PCM waveforms being included. It also has all the waveforms from the DW-6000 and DW-8000 in four tables, but I haven't messed with them yet because it seems that there is no way in any menu anywhere to click a button and get an initialized patch on the Modwave. Well at least I can't find a way. Anyone out there know? Tell me! But because it has those wavetables, I remember liking a handful of presets from the 6000 and was like hmmmmm maybe I can recreate them, but I'll need a 6000 to use as a model. Should be easy to find one, they're always on the auction, and never more than like $150. Ha! Waited AGES for one to finally get listed, and ended up paying ¥20,000 (like $135 with the exchange rate being what it is now, but to me it's more like $200). But yeah I got one. First thing to do....
Replace all the tact switches! Easy enough job. Finished in half an hour. Had the parts in a box already. Works perfectly now. Had a few iffy buttons before. The chorus has an odd noise though, like when the LFO is at its peak there's an extra whoosh of white noise in there so the MN3209 probably needs to be replaced, so I bought one off the auction as a guy had one listed. Pretty coincidental. Anyway. This synth had the most dust and extra surprises inside of any second hand synth that I've ever had. When I got it, I set it on its side and heard something inside going kablonk bump thonk boomp thud. Whaaaaat? Flipped it other way up, same series of suspect sounds. Opened it up to find a TON of dust everywhere, and these:
Left to right, post office eraser (another one of these was stuck under the power supply PCB), Black half-size marker, spaceship toy. I was like how the fuck did these get in here?!?! But then I saw that there is a big gap between the ends of the keys and the bottom panel there so yeah ok, some kid crammed his toys in there when dad wasn't looking, I guess. Madness! I also did this:
Recapped the power supply PCB. I had to lay down the large value caps as they were a different form factor from the originals, but they don't sit on parts that get hot, and they're out of the way, so whatever. Works fine. I wanna test the three large value caps on the left there to see how out of value they are, if at all. Can't find my multimeter that measures capacitance though. Where the hell did I put that thing? Hmmm.
And the failing Ruzzian invasion of Ukraine is in its hundred something day now. I won't be surprised if this little special military operation ends up being a special end of Ruzzia as we know it operation. Putler fucked up big time. The Ukrainians are never going to give up. And with the increased western assistance and advanced weapons systems they're getting? Sheeeeit. I say give them the long range HIMARS missiles and let the striking of targets within Ruzzia begin! See how they like their sunny little afternoons interrupted by the unscheduled arrival of high explosives. I learned that in Ukraine, they're referring to the occupants as svinakobacha, which is like schweinhund in German: pig-dog. Good on them. Pig-dogs fuck off! Kinda feel sorry for the people in Ruzzia, but not really. Let them suffer for the actions of their dickface dictator. And now do you wanna know how I really feel? Hahahahaha. Sucks because I love old soviet era synth stuff.... Oh well. Slava Ukraini!
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Teenage Engineering TX-6 & Other Bullshit
Pedal for size comparison... Yeah so a shit-ton of people are boohooing online about this particular device. "It's too expensive!" "What are they thinking?!" "Waaaahhhhhh!!" I feel people are missing out on the bigger picture with this. Sure, it's being marketed as a super small, portable "field" mixer, but it does SO much more than just that. Before I got this, I was using a PreSonus 16.0.2 USB, which offers four more mono channels altogether, but is about twenty or more times bigger and heavier. The reason I went with that digital mixer was because it allows simultaneous multitrack recording directly into the DAW of your choice. Also, each channel has a gate, compressor, limiter, flexible EQ, and four aux sends (though there are no aux returns). Each channel on the TX-6 has an EQ, high pass and low pass filter, and compressor. Fairly close. There is a global limiter. So, without sacrificing all that much (oh yeah the PreSonus has patch storage for mix scenes, which I never used) I now have an ultra portable mixer that I can easily take along and use in live shows. I've given it a good test drive as far as multitrack recording is concerned and it does the job quite well. THIS is the area most whiners are totally bypassing in their rants. Everyone jumps to small format analog mixers for their comparisons, but that's so far off the mark it isn't even funny. And anyway, the PreSonus was $1600. So to me, the TX-6 is actually a cheaper option, with which I can achieve virtually the same results, though with a total lower channel count, which I hope will force me to make the most out of fewer devices in my setup, which needs a trimming anyways. It IS super duper small though, so people who don't get along with the Volca series probably aren't going to jive with this mixer either. I'm super happy with it though.
Other bullshit includes me replacing the basically good as new original LCD on the JD-800 with an OLED white on black deal. Looks nice. A lot easier to read. I also picked up a JD-08, for no real reason other than there is no way in hell I'll be humping the JD-800 along to a live show. Fucker weighs a damn ton and is ginormous anyway so nope to that. The JD-08 sounds identical to the JD-800. There are annoying things about it though. OK it's cool that it has beefed up processing power and can do two layers at once but I wish they made it so that you could disable Layer B and just have it OFF, and that that setting would be retained when you turn the thing off. But no. AND it doesn't work with JD-800 sysex, which is a damn shame. There are tons of great programmers out there making awesome patch banks for the JD-800. WC Olo Garb! Need I say more? It would be cool if Roland dealt with the sysex issue in a firmware update but I won't be holding my breath. It's a great sounding teeny ass piece of gear though. That's all folks!
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Путін хуйло
Well, I didn't really wanna get political here, but it's unavoidable really. What a fucking mess. First we have to deal with a pandemic that's in its third year now and not really showing signs of slowing down all that much depending on where on the planet you are. Then we get a goddam war to go with it. The title of this post is Ukrainian for Putin is a dickhead. This particular exercise in madness frustrates me because I am a Russophile. I'm a Cold War kid. I grew up with the constant, though well in the background, definite possibility that we damn well could have a nuclear war. Russia, well, the USSR, was The Enemy. The Bad Guys. That's just the way it was. Then in my late teens the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union disintegrated and that was that. Fast forward a decade and I find myself in Japan, where I found legit Soviet Era stuff in random shops and from online sellers and listed on the auction. Fucking COOL man! I have a small collection of Soviet shit. Then I found out analog synths were made in the USSR too. FUCKING NO WAY!!! And after a bit of searching, as luck or good timing would have it, I found a Polivoks on Digimart (an online aggregator where music gear shops from all over Japan can list items for sale all under one front end page). At the time it was the most expensive synth I bought, at around $1400. I was SO in love with that thing. Infatuated even. It was so weird, and different. But after a few years I used it less and less until I finally decided to clean it up a bit and see it off. I have another Soviet Era synth here that my friend Egor in Belarus sent to me, but it needs some TLC and there are some SERIOUS shenanigans going on inside on the main circuitboard that left me just shaking my head so it's been shelved indefinitely. Anyway, the war in Ukraine has saddened me for more than the usual reasons. It means in all likelihood that now I won't ever be able to visit Russia, which was a weirdo dream of mine. Fucking politicians. Fuck Putin.
Anyway, recent shenanigans here include me spotting an O1R/W on the auction for a decent price, bidding on it, and winning with no other bids being placed. The previous owner stickered the shit out of it though. Check this out.
WHO DOES THIS??!!?!?! Aside from the stickering, it's in good shape. Had a dead backlight, so I was able to use the LED replacement one I bought for the O1R/W I have that died on me. Took care of that this morning. It was really easy except for swapping out a surface mount resistor that was the size of three grains of salt really. Goddam do my hands fucking shake anymore. I'm getting too old to deal with parts I can barely fucking see. But I pulled it off and it works fine and looks good. See for yourself.
So yay me. Though at one point I did step on the soldering iron's cord and it fell on the carpet... I was able to quick grab the handle and pick it up before anything caught fire or melted. Dumbass.
Oh someone sent me an email about the Sony HR-MP5. I meant to reply to that but it looks like instead of archiving the mail I put it in the trash. Oops. So if you're out there reading this, shoot off another mail at me and I'll get back to you. Sorry bout that.
Stay safe y'all.
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KORG nanoKEY Stupido
I recently got an iPad Pro 12.9" 3rd Gen half for work and half for just messing around. A sort of must buy is the KORG Gadget app, of course. I've had fun with it so far but using it without a physical controller is a bit tedious though not undoable. I thought I remembered KORG had released a set of bluetooth MIDI controllers that were perfectly suited for this, and after a minute of net snooping I found the nanoKEY Studio. Seems they're backordered at every online retailer here in Japan, and the ones that are being sold online are nearly $300. Say what? No way. I found one listed as "junk" on the yahoo auction for $40, as the USB port had actually snapped off from the PCB.
Yeah that looks great. Hmm. Lister said it still worked over bluetooth so I thought what the hell. It finally arrived today, but no matter what, I could not get it to connect over bluetooth to the iPad. It would see it, but just refuse to connect. OK back online for a look at what this could be. Firmware update required. Firmware update can only be done over wired USB. UGH. OK time to ghetto engineer this bastard.
I took this photo after I scraped off and tacked some solder on the remaining traces where the USB port used to be. At least there was still enough left to put some solder onto. I looked at the outer traces to see which one was going to the ground plane, as the other one would be going to power, and that would pretty much set the wiring order.
The interwebz are so awesome. So from the above photo I figured I could link the yellow and ground at the PCB side, as the micro USB cable I sacrificed to ghetto wire this up only had red, white, green and black wires. With shaky hands, the soldering began.
I twisted this around to get a photo of the mess, so it looks like the green and white wires are shorting but when I put it together I was careful to keep them apart. The traces were so small and so close together that in the end I soldered the wires right to the ends of the inductors (I suppose that's what they are as they're marked L on the PCB). In any case....
IT WORKED! After updating, I put it all back together and then checked it with the iPad and it works fine now. Yay! So it was a huge pain in the ass to be sure, but just time consuming and a bit anxiety inducing as I wasn't sure it was gonna work at all but it did and it does so I'm a happy camper.
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English Polivoks Schematics
So back when I had a Polivoks (yeah yeah I know, I sold it, and do I miss it? Not really. Sometimes) I worked on translating the schematics from Russian into English, with the gracious help of my pal Egor. First, I scanned everything, then straightened and cleaned the images up in Photoshop. Then I erased the Russian text and stuck English in its place. Took a while to do, but when my Polivoks went haywire (it really is a matter of when and not if) it was a real help to have these in English. In my case it was just the ginormous smoothing caps went kaput, so replacing them with new equivalents solved the problem. I also figured out how to mod the LFO speed (which I'm sure I posted about here aaaaages ago). Anyway...
EDIT. I originally slapped a link to the google drive where I keep these but it seems to be in an uncooperative mood so if anyone out there needs these files, email me at blackrainbows at protonmail dot com (sorry for the bot unfriendly formatting but what can you do?) and I will send them to you.
If anyone actually uses these and finds them helpful, I'd love to hear about it.
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Bah Humbug!
Merry Christmyth y'all.
Love the 70s design aesthetic of this old book I picked up off the auction. Here's the back:
Neat shit eh? Love it. So I was in need of a MIDI Merge Box, something I've never owned actually, so I could use both the JD-800 and the Launchpad Pro at the same time going into the MPC. Found one on the auction and had to tinker with it....
There it is in its half taken apart stage. I was a bit surprised to see that they just bent the legs on the LED so it fit into the hole in the enclosure. Pretty ghetto if you ask me. So all I really wanted to do was swap the red LED out with a pink one, as the thing itself is, well, PINK. So I did.
Ah ye can hardly see the pinky blinky peeking out there yeah? Weird thing about this one is that it can be run off the 5V coming through the MIDI input line, but it also comes with a wall wart that's 9VDC. I said fuggit and just plugged in the wall wart to be safe. Works fine so far. Yay!
I was noodling around with the trio of Behringer mono synths I acquired (hell hath frozen over, indeed) and I was thinking jeez wouldn't these be nice with chorus on them? Ended up trying out a few pricey pedals (Earthquaker Devices Sea Machine, Old Blood Noise Endeavors Reflector and Visitor, TC Electronics Nova Modulator and Fairfield Shallow Water—the final two here have found a permanent place in the chain on the Deckard's Dream mk2) but then stumbled across the Guyatone MC3 (micro chorus) which is an MN3001 BBD chip-based device. They're cheap so I thought the risk factor was low and bought one. Sounded really nice but was hissing like a pit of vipers, so I re-capped it with audio grade electrolytic capacitors and swapped out the factory NJM4558L op-amps with NJM4580L and boy did that clean the sound up! These op-amps are single in-line package deals, not the square 8-leggiweg standard op-amp chip variety. It was no big deal finding the 4580L though, Akizuki Electronics to the rescue. I liked the result so much I bought another one and re-capped and re-op-amped it as well. See here:
Pre-surgery.
Post-surgery. For the second one I used the blue Nichicon I forget what the series is caps... For the first one it was the silver Jovial ones, and dummy move on my part I ordered all 50v caps so the size almost became an issue, as the components are already fairly jam-packed in there from the get go. But anyway it worked and so did the second one and here is the pedal itself:
It is a really small pedal so the micro in the naming is quite justified. Here are the op-amps:
In hindsight, I shoulda recorded a before/after thing so you could hear the difference. Amazing what swapping out like $5 worth of components can do to an old pedal. No values were messed with, all equivalent replacements, aside from the op-amps which are made for audio, drop-in replacements for the original parts. Which made me think, if an op-amp was available that was made for audio applications why did Guyatone go with a part that is just a bog standard hi I'm an op-amp use me anywhere deal? It's just weird. The cost is not that much different either. G'wan google it.
So that's about it I guess. Oh I'll have an EP coming out probably in early January on France-based Ukonx Recordings. Fun stuff. Until then, have a happy new year and all that, and see ya on the flip.
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I have the worlds worst Polivoks. Can you post your English schematics?
I've migrated to another computer, so I'll have to dig up the data and then see about maybe adding it to google drive then posting a link in a post.
Sorry about the late reply.
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